Celtic’s Board And The Case Against Dominic McKay.

Not Understanding The “Complex” Transfer System.

In 2003, the famed and feared writer Tom Bower published one of his most searing critiques. Entitled Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football it is a withering, even devastating, indictment of how the game works behind the scenes.

It was an expose of crooked agents, backroom dealing, corruption in the sport, its tolerance for malfeasance and the way a sordid cast of characters are lent credibility and even acclaimed within the game even in light of well publicised scandals.

Bower’s book remains powerful today because since it was published it’s been made clear just how little things have actually changed.

Ten years after it was published, with much of the book lamenting Terry Venables ascent to the England job in the face of numerous allegations of impropriety, the FA came within an ace of offering the same job to Harry Redknapp shortly after he’d been cleared in a high court corruption case.

Although many of the practices which were then just “frowned upon” and which were discussed in the book are now against football regulations, there remains a lot of grey area out there which some people simply don’t understand.

Coming from rugby into football, Dominic McKay would have been largely clueless about them. Many of them are to do with the way players are transferred between clubs.

There is one piece of evidence which suggests that at least one deal for a player collapsed because McKay was unable to reconcile himself to football’s way of working; it involved Celtic’s efforts to sign the Rennes right-back Sacho Boey.

That deal appeared to be done until the player walked away from the negotiations blaming what he called “foreign intermediaries” for collapsing the deal.

But what does that actually mean?

Well, it could mean a lot of things, and some of them might, on the surface of it, seem outrageous to the layperson. But if you’ve read Bower’s book you might recognise the scenario. There are a lot of ways in which unscrupulous individuals can get involved in a transfer deal and demand a cut of the money. This happens more often than you might be aware, and the reason most people don’t know it is that it’s not uncustomary for one or both of the clubs involved in the deal to pay these people a stipend or percentage just to move the process along.

Think about it like this; a deal is just about done and then someone appears on the scene to claim that they own certain image rights or once represented the player or that they had a signed contract which claims that they do; how do you handle that?

Challenge it in court? That could take forever, and in the meantime you don’t get the player, the player doesn’t get to move, the selling clubs gets no transfer fee … who has time to wade through a legal minefield when it’s much easier to add or subtract £60,000 from the transfer fee and get that person and their claims out of the road.

Understand, there’s nothing illegal about this and if it’s done in the “right” way it’s not even against football regulations. It’s part of the cost of doing business. It’s an unpleasant, but accepted, part of the game and we’re kidding ourselves if we think it doesn’t happen.

But imagine you’re Dominic McKay with no idea how this stuff works. Imagine this guy or this agency pops up in the closing stages of a deal and makes a cash demand. Would you know to pay it? Would you understand the lay of the land? Or would you hold off?

Sacho Boey thought the deal was done, and then all of a sudden he was aware of the existence of these “foreign intermediaries” and their demands. Under normal circumstances the player would neither know nor care about these people, because the clubs, between them, would work on that side of it and get it all taken care of.

But perhaps – and this of course is purely speculation – McKay either didn’t want to do that or didn’t know how that part of the system works.

That’s how deals run into delays and eventually don’t get done, and in this case the player wasn’t willing to wait for these issues to be resolved.